17th March 2009 Archive

Stephen Wolfram - the lovable George Costanza of the mathematics community who developed the invaluable Mathematica suite and wrote the much talked about but quickly forgotten "A New Kind of Science” - is trying his hand at artificial intelligence.

If Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 8 this week — as expected — then the company will likely be congratulated by many for doing the right thing and finally adding support for web standards to its browser.

With Cisco Systems launching its first server/system product today, the other server makers of the world were looking around to see what kind of news they could scrape up. Over at Sun Microsystems, the news today is that the South African Department of Science and Technology has funded a hybrid Sparc-Xeon supercomputing cluster based on Sun iron that will weigh in at 27 teraflops.

The European Commission has reiterated its demand for the creation of a single European patent. It said the absence of such a protection is hindering the growth of technology companies in the European Union.

Crew aboard the International Space Station were yesterday told they would not have to perform a "debris avoidance maneuver"* after NASA deemed a 10-centimetre piece of the destroyed Russian Cosmos 1275 satellite posed no threat to the orbiting outpost.

Iolo Technologies has teamed up with Register Hardware to bring 20 lucky readers the latest version of Iolo's System Mechanic 8.5 - software designed to ensure your PC hardware always runs at maximum efficiency.

Here on the Reg raygun desk, we like a deadly laser cannon designed to rid the skies of airborne assailants as much as the next man - indeed, perhaps rather more so. On some days our simple pleasure is spoiled, however, by the thought that humanity is merely wasting its resources on engines of destruction, and doing little to make the world a better place.

A man whose invention caught the attention of millions of television viewers may have infringed a patent he applied for himself ten years ago. A contestant on the Dragons' Den TV programme may have to defend his invention from legal action.

On 17 February, international nosh monolith Kraft revealed a new logo for Kraft Foods - a "global identity... that it hopes will drive the company forward in its second year of a three-year turnaround plan".

The catchily named Samsung PB22-J MMDOE56G5MXP-0VB weighs in at 256GB and is the biggest SSD we've seen to date. Biggest, that is, in terms of capacity. Physically, it follows the usual 2.5in hard drive form-factor and measures 100 x 70 x 9.5mm. Cosmetically, it’s an attractive drive that has a brushed metal finish but, let’s face it, once the drive is installed, you couldn’t care less what it looks like.

Proposals to make it a criminal offence to possess cartoons depicting certain forms of child abuse are heading back to the House of Commons, and elsewhere in the UK and across the atlantic, it's becoming clear there is an appetite in certain quarters for a much wider clampdown on freedom of expression.

The government demonstrated just how much its brave efforts to battle the economic downturn have captured the nation's imagination yesterday, coughing to a yearlong slide in traffic to HM Treasury's websites.

A lone researcher has dared to speak up against the obesity health insanity outbreak, one of several sweeping the western world as medical professionals attempt to shift blame for rocketing healthcare costs onto their customers.

The European space agency's dart-shaped GOCE satellite, designed to skim through the extreme upper atmosphere using ion drives to compensate for air drag, has launched successfully from Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia.

The scientists who brought the world proof that, in keeping with ancient lore, cows really do graze along a north-south axis, have found the reason they sometimes fail to display their natural animal magnetism.

Yesterday's launch of the California blade system by Cisco Systems was a little short on the feeds, speeds, and pricing information. But if you want someone to buy a funky new data center gadget, you have to be a little more specific, and luckily Cisco has some server people who understand this.

A number of folks have asked me what tools and techniques I use to reverse engineer Cocoa executables. I thought it would be worth taking some time out from documenting undocumented APIs to show you how easy it is to do the same thing for yourself.

In December, just three months after a much-ballyhooed release, Google took the beta tag off its open-source Chrome operating system browser. It was an unexpected move by the Mountain View Chocolate Factory, which typically holds onto beta tags for most of eternity.